Especially to All the Lonely People from “Eleanor Rigby”

On Thanksgiving here in America let us thank God for our lives and the greatest opportunity it provides which is to serve His plan and purpose while we devout our love to Him our Father in the Holy name of Jesus. Amen.

As we share our love with family during holiday festivities remember to pray for all those who are alone or in any difficult unfortunate circumstances, those multitudes that are suffering; that they are blessed to know our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who wants to lead them home!

“To me the lyric of a song is secondary, but the song in question is a welcome departure from the usual, overworked theme of love, but also it has a good melody and expresses sympathy for the lonely.” Bernard says: December 24, 2020 at 5:40 pm

Like anything in this life truth and facts must be ferreted out so carry on from here listening to the tune then read all of the text, there is a second version of the story behind the song, and then another song that nails down the significant all encapsulating meaning of “Lonely People!”

Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor Rigby
Picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window
Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

Father McKenzie
Writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear
No one comes near
Look at him working
Darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there
What does he care?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor Rigby
Died in the church and was buried along with her name
Nobody came
Father McKenzie
Wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave
No one was saved

All the lonely people (ah, look at all the lonely people)
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people (ah, look at all the lonely people)
Where do they all belong?

Bitrok 997

4 months ago

“This song makes me feel something that I can’t express with words”

Jerry Solis

1 month ago

“It’s the cello. The full haunting sound that reaches inside you. I heard a cellist in church play once and I wept. That haunting full enthralling sound. It pulls at your soul.”

Robert Davis

2 years ago

“Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name.” One of the most famous and hauntingly poignant lines in all of rock history.”

SoldierWombat

 13 days ago

“Best song from the Beatles and one of the best scenes from Yellow Submarine.”

The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby” Lyrics Meaning

by SMF · Published February 18, 2020 · Updated February 19, 2020

“Eleanor Rigby” is a certified Beatles’ classic, indeed somewhat of a cultural phenomenon in and of itself. And as such, certain information should be established from the onset.

First is that for all intents and purpose it is safe to say that the titular character, Eleanor Rigby, was not a real person. This seems to be an idea that many fans of the song have a hard time accepting. But throughout the years, for the most part Paul McCartney, the primary writer of the tune, has contended that Miss Rigby is indeed a fictitious character. Yes, at one point he did acknowledge that his conjuring up this name may have been the subconscious result of being influenced by a particular tombstone in a graveyard he used to hang out in during his youth. But he has also contended that she is a totally-fictitious character, one whose people’s insistence to prove is real has to some degree confounded him.

Indeed at the end of the day, the factual consensus is that he got the first name of the character from an actress (Eleanor Bron) who was associated with the Beatles at the time. And the last name was derived from a liquor store (Rigby & Evens Ltd, Wine & Spirit Shippers) he was familiar with in the UK.

Father McKenzie is not real!

And the same also goes for the second character we are introduced to in this song, Father McKenzie. In fact he was originally named Father McCartney after Macca himself. But to Paul personally, this appellation invoked images of his father. And upon realizing that his dad is nothing like the character portrayed in the song, he decided to rename him.

“Eleanor Rigby” is partially based on Reality

But with those facts being established, this is not to imply that “Eleanor Rigby” does not have any basis in reality. Rather let’s say that the titular character is a composite of a number of different elderly ladies Paul McCartney used to hang out with when he was a child. Indeed he even used to run errands for them. So you can say that his sympathy for the type of person Eleanor is depicted as is real.

Narrative

Now as for the narrative itself, it centers primarily on the Beatles acknowledging “all the lonely people”. More specifically it depicts Eleanor Rigby and Father McKenzie as lonely souls themselves. And the first of the two we are introduced to is Eleanor. Interestingly enough her age is never specified. However, one peculiar characteristic she has is her tendency to ‘pick up the rice in a church where a wedding has been’. And despite this being somewhat of an unorthodox statement, it does effectively relay the fact that she is indeed lonely, perhaps even suffering from some sort of mental issues or poverty as a result.

Father McKenzie is also an interesting case. We see that he is in fact a priest of some sort or a head of a church. However, his congregation is nonexistent.  Thus his loneliness is manifest by him being akin to a leader with no followers. Yet despite this, he stays committed to his profession.

Climax of the Story

So the way the story climaxes is with Eleanor Rigby eventually passing away.  And sadly enough, “nobody came” to her funeral. But furthermore it is Father McKenzie who actually buries her. And so the story ends, with the Beatles apparently lamenting for “all the lonely people” throughout.

Now it’s debatable that they are trying to relay certain messages, lessons if you will, via this tale. For instance, it has been speculated by some fans that the case is presented as ideally Eleanor and Father McKenzie would have met when she was still alive, became friends and thus served as the remedy to each other’s loneliness. There is also a peculiar, ambiguous line at the end of the third verse, after Rigby is buried, which reads “no one is saved”.

Now at the time this song was dropped, the Beatles, particularly John Lennon, was going through an anti-Christian phase, so to speak. So it is honestly quite-feasible that since the church is one of the settings of this song, as well as a priest being one of its central characters, that the band is actually taking a jab at the organized religion. And if so what they would basically be pointing to is the idea of Christianity failing some of its adherents in the most-fundamental way.

Conclusion

Verily, if a listener wants to look for additional meaning in this song by examining the rich history of the Beatles, combined with the symbolic nature of some of its lyrics, there is definitely enough there to lend to varying interpretations. But by and large, the narrative featured within “Eleanor Rigby” is straightforward and easy-to-follow. That is to say that most people who appreciate the tune lyrically do so because of the parts of the song that are simple to understand. And in that regard, it is fundamentally a sad song. It is a sorrowful song centered on an old lady who lives with no one to care for her and dies with no one to bury her.

In other words it’s the type of track to invoke sympathy for those who may actually be living under such circumstances, i.e. a humanitarian tune. And at the end of the day, “Eleanor Rigby” is one of the reasons why many people feel that the Beatles were musical geniuses. They were pop artists who were able to write and recite a hit song about such thought-provoking and heart-wrenching subject matter as care for the elderly and sympathy for the lonely.

Facts about “Eleanor Rigby”

The credited writers of this song are Paul McCartney and an entity known as Lennon-McCartney. The latter would be a combination of Paul McCartney and his Beatles’ bandmate, John Lennon (1940-1980). Furthermore it is noted for being the first song which Mr. McCartney had written which was not centered on the theme of love.

The musical score of this song was composed by another Beatle, George Harrison (1943-2001). None of the Beatles themselves actually played instruments on this track. And in that regard, “Eleanor Rigby” is said to be one-of-a-kind. In this case what they did do was employ session musicians consisting of two violists, two cellists and four violinists. And

due to the complexity of the instrumental, the Beatles never played this tune live.

The producer of “Eleanor Rigby” was the Beatles co-worker on most of their hits, Sir George Martin (1926-2016).

This track originally came out on 5 August 1966 as part of the Beatles’ album entitled “Revolver”.

“Eleanor Rigby” was quite-successful. It topped the UK Singles Chart and performed likewise in Canada and New Zealand. In fact it is noted for being the top-selling song in the UK for 1966.

Moreover it peaked at number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. Apparently it was not promoted as heavily in the United States as it was in the UK due to the religious references in the song.

“Eleanor Rigby” also earned Paul McCartney in particular a Grammy Award. This was in 1966, and it was awarded in the category of “Best Contemporary (R&R) Solo Vocal Performance – Male or Female”.

Moreover as of 2011, Rolling Stone has ranked this track at number 138 on its list of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”.

Popular Covers of “Eleanor Rigby”

A number of prominent artists have covered “Eleanor Rigby”, especially during its heyday. Amongst them are:

     Ray Charles (1968)

    Aretha Franklin (1969)

    John Denver (1970)

    Tony Bennett (1971)

    José Feliciano (1992)

    Pearl Jam (2005)

Paul McCartney also did his own remix of this song and featured it on his 1984 solo album, “Give My Regards to Broad Street”.

The Eleanor Rigby Fascination

Despite Paul McCartney acknowledging, as aforementioned, that Eleanor Rigby is not a real person, fans of the tune have still been obsessed with tracking down a real person by this name who fits the character described in the song.  Indeed sometimes their efforts are borderline comedic. For instance, the aforementioned headstone in Liverpool, England (i.e. the Beatles’ hometown) which cites an “Eleanor Rigby” has accordingly become somewhat of a tourist attraction. Said headstone is even depicted on the music video to the 1995 Beatles’ track “Free as a Bird”. Moreover a document from 1911, which Paul McCartney at one time personally handled, which references a Eleanor Rigby (more specifically “E. Rigby”) was auctioned off for a whopping £115,000 pounds (approximately $250,000) in 2008.

Interesting to note is that there is also a real Eleanor Rigby statue located in the English city of Liverpool. It was erected in the aforementioned city in 1982. And interestingly, it is directly based on the character from the song.

https://www.songmeaningsandfacts.com/the-beatles-eleanor-rigby-lyrics-meaning/

Songfacts®:

Paul McCartney wrote most of this song. He got the name “Eleanor” from the actress Eleanor Bron, who appeared in the 1965 Beatles film Help!. “Rigby” came to him when he was in Bristol, England, and spotted a store: Rigby and Evens Ltd Wine and Spirit Shippers. He liked the name “Eleanor Rigby” because it sounded natural and matched the rhythm he wrote.

McCartney explained at the time that his songs came mostly from his imagination. Regarding this song, he said, “It just came. When I started doing the melody I developed the lyric. It all came from the first line. I wonder if there are girls called Eleanor Rigby?”

McCartney wasn’t sure what the song was going to be about until he came up with the line “picks up the rice in a church where a wedding has been.” That’s when he came up with the story of an old, lonely woman. The lyrics “wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door” are a reference to the cold-cream she wears in an effort to look younger.

The song tells the story of two lonely people. First, we meet a churchgoing woman named Eleanor Rigby, who is seen cleaning up rice after a wedding. The second verse introduces the pastor, Father McKenzie, whose sermons “no one will hear.” This could indicate that nobody in coming to his church, or that his sermons aren’t getting through to the congregation on a spiritual level. In the third verse, Eleanor dies in the church and Father McKenzie buries her.

“Father Mackenzie” was originally “Father McCartney.” Paul decided he didn’t want to freak out his dad and picked a name out of the phone book instead.

After Eleanor Rigby is buried, we learn that “no one was saved,” indicating that her soul did not elevate to heaven as promised by the church. This could be seen as a swipe at Christianity and the concept of being saved by Jesus. The song was released in August 1966 just weeks after the furor over John Lennon’s remarks, “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now.”

For the most part, the song eluded controversy, possibly because the lilting string section made it easier to handle.

A string section scored by Beatles producer George Martin consisting of four violins, two violas and two cellos were used in recording. Paul may have been inspired by the classic composer Vivaldi.

The Beatles didn’t play any of the instruments on this track. All the music came from the string players, who were hired as session musicians.

Paul McCartney recounted this song’s origin story in a 2018 interview with GQ. He said: “When I was really little I lived on what was called a housing estate, which is like the projects – there were a lot of old ladies and I enjoyed sitting around with these older ladies because they had these great stories, in this case about World War II. One in particular I used to visit and I’d go shopping for her – you know, she couldn’t get out. So I had that figure in my mind of a sort of lonely old lady.

Over the years, I’ve met a couple of others, and maybe their loneliness made me empathize with them. But I thought it was a great character, so I started this song about the lonely old lady who picks up the rice in the church, who never really gets the dreams in her life. Then I added in the priest, the vicar, Father McKenzie. And so, there was just the two characters. It was like writing a short story, and it was basically on these old ladies that I had known as a kid.”

In Observer Music Monthly, November 2008, McCartney said: “These lonely old ladies were something I knew about growing up, and that was what ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was about – the fact that she died and nobody really noticed. I knew this went on.”

There is a gravestone for an Eleanor Rigby in St. Peter’s Churchyard in Woolton, England. Woolton is a suburb of Liverpool and Lennon first met McCartney at a fete at St. Peter’s Church. The gravestone bearing the name Eleanor Rigby shows that she died in October 1939, aged 44.

However Eleanor was not like the lonely people in McCartney’s song, as she was married. Another of the gravestones there has the word “McKenzie” written on it. McCartney has denied that that is the source of the names, though he has agreed that they may have registered subconsciously.

This was originally written as “Miss Daisy Hawkins.” According to Rolling Stone magazine, when McCartney first played the song for his neighbor Donovan Leitch, the words were “Ola Na Tungee, blowing his mind in the dark with a pipe full of clay.”

The lyrics were brainstormed among The Beatles. In later years, Lennon and McCartney gave different accounts of who contributed more of the words to the song.

During recording, microphones were placed very close to the instruments to create an unusual, vaguely distorted sound.

Ray Charles reached #35 US and #36 UK with his version in 1968; Aretha Franklin took it to #17 US in 1969. A year later, an instrumental by the group El Chicano went to #115. The song reached the chart again in 2008 when David Cook of American Idol fame took it to #92.

Because of the string section, this was difficult to play live, which The Beatles never did. On his 2002 Back In The US tour, Paul McCartney played this without the strings. Keyboards were used to compensate.

This song was not written in a normal chord, it is in the dorian mode – the scale you get when you play one octave up from the second note of a major scale. This is usually found in old songs such as “Scarborough Fair.”

Vanilla Fudge covered this in a slowed-down, emotional style, something they did with many songs, including hits by ‘N Sync and The Backstreet Boys. Their version of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” was a #6 US hit in 1968. Fudge drummer Carmine Appice told Songfacts: “Most of the songs we did, we tried to take out of the realm they were in and try to put them where they were supposed to be in our eyes. ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was always a great song by The Beatles. It was done with the orchestra, but the way we did it, we put it into an eerie graveyard setting and made it spooky, the way the lyrics read. Songs like ‘Ticket To Ride,’ that’s a hurtin’ song, so we slowed it down so it wouldn’t be so happy. We would look at lyrics and the lyrics would dictate if it was feasible to do something with it or not.”

In 1966, this song took home the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Pop Vocal Performance, Male. It was awarded to Paul McCartney.

In August 1966, the long-defunct British music magazine Disc And Music Echo asked Kinks frontman Ray Davies to review the then newly released Revolver album. This is how he reacted to this song: “I bought a Haydn LP the other day and this sounds just like it. It’s all sort of quartet stuff and it sounds like they’re out to please music teachers in primary schools. I can imagine John saying: ‘I’m going to write this for my old schoolmistress’. Still it’s very commercial.”

The chorus of this song was sampled as part of Sinead O’Connor’s 1994 song “Famine,” which is based on the story of the potato famine in Ireland.

In 2008 a document came to light that showed that McCartney may have had an alternative source for the Eleanor Rigby name. In the early 1990s a lady named Annie Mawson had a job teaching music to children with learning difficulties. Annie managed to teach a severely autistic boy to play “Yellow Submarine” on the piano, which won him a Duke of Edinburgh Silver Award. She wrote to the former Beatle telling him what joy he’d brought. Months later, Annie received a brown envelope bearing a “Paul McCartney World Tour” stamp. Inside was enclosed a page from an accounts log kept by the Corporation of Liverpool, which records the wages paid in 1911 to a scullery maid working for the Liverpool City Hospital, who signed her name “E. Rigby.” There was no accompanying letter of explanation. Annie said in an interview that when she saw the name Rigby, “I realized why I’d been sent it. I feel that when you’re holding it you’re holding a bit of history.”

When the slip went up for auction later that year, McCartney told the Associated Press: “Eleanor Rigby is a totally fictitious character that I made up. If someone wants to spend money buying a document to prove a fictitious character exists, that’s fine with me.”

This was released simultaneously on August 5, 1966 on both the album Revolver and as a double A-side with “Yellow Submarine.”

The thrash band Realm covered this song on their 1988 album Endless War. It is a speed metal version of the song that got them signed to Roadrunner Records.

McCartney told Q magazine June 2010 that after recording the song, he felt he could have done better. He recalled: “I remember not liking the vocal on Eleanor Rigby, thinking, I hadn’t nailed. I listen to it now and it’s… very good. It’s a bit annoying when you do Eleanor Rigby and you’re not happy with it.”

Former US President Bill Clinton has stated that this is his favorite Beatles song.

Richie Havens covered this on his 1966 debut album, Mixed Bag, and again on his 1987 Sings Beatles and Dylan album.

©2021 Songfacts®, LLC

https://www.songfacts.com/facts/the-beatles/eleanor-rigby

About Lonely People

“Lonely People” is a song written by the husband-and-wife team of Dan Peek and Catherine Peek and recorded by America.

This is for all the lonely people

Thinking that life has passed them by

Don’t give up

Until you drink from the silver cup

And ride that highway in the sky

This is for all the single people

Thinking that love has left them dry

Don’t give up

Until you drink from the silver cup

You never know until you try

Well, I’m on my way

Yes, I’m back to stay

Well, I’m on my way back home

This is for all the lonely people

Thinking that life has passed them by

Don’t give up

Until you drink from the silver cup

She’ll never take you down or

Never give you up

You’ll never know until you try.

God gave so much by His expression of love when he created us and all of this the seen and the unseen; then even gave Himself as the Redeemer to bridge the chasm between imperfection and corruption unto Holiness and Eternal Perfection in God’s glory for those of faith through Jesus Christ the Savior and Good Shepherd!  During the Holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas as well throughout the year we must do our best to remember these facts and truth that tells us so clearly how it is better to give than to receive!

God bless you.

Paul’s Farewell to the Ephesians

“34You yourselves know that these hands of mine have ministered to my own needs and those of my companions. 35In everything, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus Himself: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” 36When Paul had said this, he knelt down with all of them and prayed.”  Acts 20:35

“John 3:16 is one of the most well-known verses of all time. It says, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”

“In the very presence of Jesus, God demonstrates that He is love—and love gives. If we truly want to be like Jesus, we’ll give.” pushpay.com

• Giving reflects God’s character
• Giving is commanded
• Giving makes you happy
• Giving makes you healthier and live longer
• Giving expresses your trust in God
• Giving advances the Kingdom of God

https://get.tithe.ly/blog/is-it-better-to-give-than-to-receive

 

Brother in Christ Jesus,

Lawrence Morra III

If You Need More After All That and You’re Not Crying Already Like I Am; An Extra Grand Exit Song…

Now As We Weep!

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